


Counting Blessings

by edochen



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:35:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3558005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edochen/pseuds/edochen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy lives his life both in the past and present. Because living with Jim may have its difficulties but without him isn't a walk in the park either. Zombie-apocalypse AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Blessings

**Author's Note:**

> It's just explicit enough for me to warn for it. Also putting trigger warning: suicide in there. So please, be careful of that. 
> 
> Otherwise, enjoy.

>>>I<<<

The silence was an invitation, the feeling of sanctuary an aphrodisiac. Jim’s skin feels like wildfire, a boundless heat and destruction just underneath his fingertips. He moves in closer to press his lips on Jim’s, and groans when Jim deflects. Instead Jim cranes his neck to get what he wants, sucks and bites little trails down his salty skin, only to turn back to lick and suck at his lower lip like the merciful man he is.

His weight is almost nothing, he’s not heavy, he may have been once but Leonard’s never met him like that. He only knows this Jim, whose ankles are thin and delicate and whose upper legs can rest on Leonard’s without him having the urge to move. Instead he wants to stay like this. He says so, whispers so low that Jim can’t possible hear. ‘Just like that’ he says.

Jim understands, somehow. For a little while he doesn’t move, just leans in closer, breathes in deeper. Leonard holds his breath in return; he wants to feel this, all of Jim. He’s been having this more lately, it hasn’t always been like this. He doesn’t want to think what changed so suddenly now, he knows the feeling, remembers it clear as day. It’s the reason he got married once, the reason why ‘until death do us part’ didn’t seem like a whole lot of time.

When Jim begins to move he doesn’t angle his hips up, only down, keeping as much skin to skin contact possible. It’s impractical and messy, strenuous for Jim, unnecessarily so, but god if it isn’t what Leonard needs.

Jim gasps, arms straining on either side of Leonard’s shoulders. He turns his head to the side and laughs, breathy and hitched. “We’re fogging the windows, Bones,” Jim says, nodding to the far wall. Leonard doesn’t even think about looking away.

He feels feverish, licks his lips and watches the rings of blue around Jim’s dilated pupils. They’re dark in the shimmering of their little gas lamp, standing on the table of the small tracker hut they found. Deserted but untainted.

Jim spreads his legs and sits up, straddling Leonard, who shudders by the sudden space between them. The cool air on his sweat slicked skin. “No,” Leonard says, and grabs for Jim’s arms to pull him back down. Jim catches the arms before they catch him, he tangles Leonard’s fingers with his own and smiles, broad and wicked.

“Come on,” Jim says, voice hoarse and soft, almost like he’s someone else. He pulls Leonard upright, still straddling his hips. “Up, up, up.”

When Leonard joins him upright he gets rewarded by the taste of Jim’s lips, who grabs his own cock and then Leonard’s and sets a stroking pace that’s slow, patient. It stings Leonard’s eyes, the prelude of a sentiment.

Out there in the wild they don’t have slow, there is no space for patience. Out there there’s only today, only now. Every chance they get to touch is hurried. As if it’s some kind of sin, as if they’re tempting fate.

“Love you darlin’,” Leonard repeats, over and over again, his lips caressing cool skin in the curve of Jim’s neck. “Love you, Jim.”

Jim comes gasping his name, Leonard following close behind. Jim lets himself drop on his back, like a man fallen, his hand still on them both, not letting go, still twisting his wrist in tiny little circles. He closes his eyes and Leonard finally manages to turn towards the fogged over windows and smiles.

“You know we can’t stay here,” Jim says, he’s twisted his spine like a cat just so he can look at Leonard. “I mean, I know you’re a bit of a homebody.”

“And you can’t seem to sit still,” Leonard replies, slapping a hand on the flat of Jim’s stomach just within his reach. They’ve been in the same place for two days now, and as far as Jim’s concerned that’s one day too long. They’re not supposed to linger in places they can’t secure, where they can’t protect themselves. The shed is secluded and there were no signs of inhabitants anywhere near the perimeter but Jim had noted, not without merit, that any place so well maintained had to have an owner. If they were unfortunate it would’ve been other scouts, individuals who used these sheds to go hunting, at worst this was a military outpost. This was more likely than Leonard ever hoped to admit.

Jim rolled from the bed, feet hitting the dirty wooden floor as he tiptoed to the small table and picked up an apple from the mini-peck he’d managed to gather in the afternoon. He jumped back on the hard bed with the same twist, making Leonard groan as Jim rested his weight on Leonard’s chest, arms cropped up under him so he could both look at Leonard and eat.

“You’re pretty heavy, Jim,” Leonard said, and had to shift up a bit in order to breathe.

Jim’s teeth were in the apple but the smile translated in his eyes in that beautiful way as he let out a low chuckle. “Liar.”

After Jim eats his apple he bows down, lies down on Leonard’s chest and closes his eyes again. Judging by the fluttering of his eyes and the sighing not asleep but calm, docile. His arms fall by the wayside and pinch at Leonard’s waist. It’s a good sign, Jim gets more tactile when he’s relaxed. Jim wants to stay just as much as he does, even if they can’t.

“So, where are we heading next?” Leonard asks.

Jim shifts a little but doesn’t open his eyes. “We stick to the plan,” he says, drumming his fingertips on Leonard’s sides with a gentle touch. “As far away from San Francisco as we can.”

“Oh,” Leonard replies, and then lets out a laugh and sings off-tune. “Summertime will be a love-in there.”

“God, you’re such a hippie,” Jim mutters with a sigh, the vowels lost as his lips trace over Leonard chest giving Leonard goose bumps.

A second later Jim’s humming the tune himself, some of the lyrics finding way out of his mouth. The words are wrong here and there but Leonard stays his comments. Jim has a lovely voice, even if he doesn’t know the words.

“Sounds great,” Leonard says, fighting to keep a straight face when Jim stops humming and arches a brow at him. “I mean it.”

Jim rolls off again, leaving Leonard’s clammy skin cooling in the air, and he stifles a shiver as he watches Jim get dressed. One leg in his worn jeans he pulls a sweater, Leonard’s old sweater, now their old sweater. Though Leonard can’t remember when his clothes became their clothes. He pulls a face when he smells the fabric, throws it back on the table and pulls his other jean leg in, and buttons the jeans as they sit a little slack on his hips.

He throws another pair at Leonard and it lands at the foot of the bed. “Are we going somewhere ?”

Jim grabs another apple and stuffs it in his pocket. “To the river,” he replies and stuffs all their clothes into a single bag, together with an almost finished bar of soap. “Laundry day. Quick, before the sun rises.”

Leonard sits up with the groan of an old man, just to make Jim laugh, which he does. “Don’t strain yourself too much,” he chuckles.

>>>>II<<<<

Thunder and lightning reign outside and water comes pouring down the sides of roof like steady streams.

The storm was just as real in his dream as it was now, so Leonard isn’t even sure whether he has slept at all.

The windows in the room are fogged up, and he wipes a hand across the cool dampness to look outside. He sees only rain and mud. Inside water leaks in from the ceiling like drops of a broken faucet, just a couple of inches from the now overflowing bucket Leonard placed there the other night.

He rolls out of bed and pulls on his boots, another sweater on top of the one he’s already wearing, and a borrowed raincoat that’s a little tattered around the edges but still fulfills its purpose. He takes the bucket with him when he goes outside and is somewhat surprised by the sheer force of the wind, how it howls around him. Howling even louder was Hikaru Sulu, whose voice Leonard recognized right away.

He was standing on the communications tower, drenched to the bone. Sulu’s relieved Leonard for the night shift with an astute “It’s coming down real hard tonight, I just know it.” Sulu used to be a pilot, stationed on an air force base in Vietnam. Sulu knew rain like no other, he claimed. Leonard took his word for it.

“Get the panel,” he yells, kneeling on the communications hut with a screwdriver  wiping the water down his face with the drenched sleeve of his jacket. Two women carry a rusty ribbed steel panel up to him and he stops fastening the satellite dish to take it, arms straining to keep the panel for slipping through his fingers. There’s a flash and the sound of thunder that follows, it envelops everything in a bright light that makes Leonard squint his eyes. The sky is a nocturne dark.

The panel threatens to slip down anyway, and Leonard hurries to the side, trying to keep his boots from sticking in the ankle deep mud. When he touches the panel Sulu shakes his head. “Get Scotty!” he says and points to the other side of the camp. Leonard nods.

The settlement is a camp of roughly twenty people, housed in sheds and old homes from families long gone. It’s not a big venture to walk from one end of the settlement to the next, but the unsteady ground and the stubborn wind increases his time of getting there. Good thing they’re living on hilly grounds, the community tower built on its highest point and all the way down below the entrance. The place where the water gathers the most like an shallow trough. That’s where he finds Scotty, towering sandbags into a wall with a couple of other men and women. “Scotty, the tower,” he tells him, trying to slow down from his quick descend from the hill, he almost slips and falls.

“Aye,” Scotty replies, like he already knows. He continues stacking bags of sand however, and instructs the other workers, though Leonard stands a mite too far away to tell just what he’s saying.

Then Scotty wipes his hands on his pants.  “Better get to the clinic yourself, McCoy,” he says. “They’ll be needing you more there than here stacking sandbags.” Scotty doesn’t take the winding path up and instead scales the hill at its steepest for the shortest ascend. Montgomery Scott is the eldest in the settlement, but his age hardly ever shows. He slips a couple of times in his adventurous climb, but ventures on.

Chapel is already at the clinic, applying a tourniquet to a young boy who’s covered in mud from top to bottom.

“The kids are upstairs,” she says when she sees Leonard.

Without hesitating Leonard takes the broadcloth from Chapel’s hands and stands beside her.

“You try to calm them down, I’ll take over,” he says. She nods and walks up the stairs. Leonard pulls a chair towards him without looking and sits down, looks at the messy blood and scrapes on the boy’s face, caked in mud.

“I’ll have to disinfect that,” Leonard says, more to himself than to the boy, who still reacts.

“Miss Chapel already boiled the water,” the boy named Chekov says, and he turns his head so slowly that Leonard suspects that he’s in more pain than he likes to admit.

Leonard walks to the supply closet for some gauze and clean linens. “Can you pull off your own shirt? I’d like to have a quick look at your chest. Did you fall down?”

“Yes,” Chekov’s voice strained as he sits up straighter. “I was on the roof with Hikaru.”

Leonard can’t help the disapproving sound that escapes his lips. He has always counted Chekov as one of the children, no matter how many times the boy claimed, lied, that he was twenty-one years old. There was no way to verify but Leonard more or less estimated him at sixteen, seventeen at most. Far too young to be running with the adults. The fact that Sulu never agreed with it was what they had agreed to disagree upon, but letting the kid on the roof had been irresponsible. Even if he had been twenty-one years old.

A number of bruises, already darkening in color, covers the kid's chest.

 

Leonard sighs. “I think you’d better strip down completely, Pavel.” He turns back towards the supply closet, and gets some other instruments, a penlight to see if the kid has any head injuries.

“No,” Chekov says, but the simple twisting towards Leonard already makes him wince in pain. “I want to go back outside and help them.”

Leonard shines the light in Chekov’s eyes, which close in reflex. His pupillary light reflexes seemed normal. “Trust me,” he muttered. “You’re going to be more trouble than anything if you’re going to go back out there, now.”

“I feel fine,” Chekov says, and Leonard hasn't quite  touched the side of his chest when he keens in pain.

“That’s bruised, boy,” he tells Chekov with the dry conclusiveness of a clinician. “So you ain’t going anywhere.”

The news quiets Chekov down, and with some help he manages to strip down to his underwear and waits as Leonard fixes him up. When he’s done he looks a lot better, definitely calmer, and rests on the makeshift exam table with his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Leonard hovers a flask above him and shakes it. “We’re a little low on painkillers at the moment, so I’m going to give you some of Scotty’s hooch. Do not –,” he starts but pauses and pulls the flask away when Chekov tries to take it from him. “Drink the whole thing. It’s strong.”

“Don’t worry, doctor,” Chekov says with a lopsided smirk. “I can hold my own.”

“Yeah, I bet you do,” Leonard mutters, and he turns his chair so he can side wrong-side forward, straddling the back of the seat between his legs. He watches as Chekov takes a big gulp of the firewater Scotty called alcohol and smirks when Chekov makes a face and coughs, which is bound to hurt. “One more,” Leonard says. Chekov obliges and then hands the flask back to Leonard, before lying back down, his eyes already half-closed. The kid is exhausted.

“It’s okay to sleep, kid,” he says, not quite keeping himself from taking a sip from the flask himself.

Chekov answers by blinking slowly, he looks at Leonard and smiles. “I think I had my birthday a couple of weeks ago, doctor,” he says. “I wasn’t sure about it, but now that fall has come, I’m sure.”

“Congratulations,” Leonard says. “How old?”

Chekov closes his eyes and smiles brighter, the alcohol kicking in quickly because of Chekov’s empty stomach and exhaustion. “Seventeen, sir.”

 

 

>>>III<<<

San Francisco is even foggier in the inner city, closer to the ocean. It’s almost impenetrable sometimes and they move so slow that it makes Leonard antsy.

After the job with Nero falls through there’s nothing left for them in the quarantine zone. Jim thinks so anyway. Leonard doubts whether there was ever anything in there for them in the first place. They have just enough water to last them a day or two, maybe three, and not a lot of food but they’ve often made due with less. Only they’re out of the protective walls now, and they don’t know what’s out there. Leonard doesn’t want to find out.

He lets Jim lead the way but stays close, even while Jim springs around as if he’s about to bound off.

“I used to drive up this road, down to my brother,” he explains, gesturing with his hand in a straight line. “About a twenty minute drive, ten when I did it. Did I tell you I had a motorcycle, Bones?” he turns to ask.

Leonard smirks. “Couple of times.”

“Sam called it a death trap.” Jim picks up a rock, throws it in the flooding water that surrounds them. “So I took it with me just to vex him.”

Leonard rolled his eyes and Jim shrugged. “He was always telling me what to do, what not to do. Sometimes I just wanted to bash his head in just to make him stop.” Jim looks into the distance, into the white haze of the fog. Leonard hesitates to move or say anything. Jim never talked much about Sam or his parents. From what Leonard knew, Jim’s parents were out of the picture long before all their lives we’re turned upside down.

In a twisted, private feeling he believes Jim is lucky in this way.

At a time Leonard too felt that he had little to lose and had to learn to hard way just how much a man has until it is all gone.

But Jim had lost everything so soon, and every little thing he had left. Jim had a brother, three nephews and a pregnant sister in law. He may not have had a place to call home, but his brother had had one, and now they weren’t around anymore.

There weren’t any lucky ones still around in the world. The lucky ones, the real lucky ones, had died at the beginning. Leonard could count them on one hand.

His dad had been lucky to not have been able to fight that tumor, pressing so hard against his nervous system that it made him wail out in pain. When Leonard gave that lethal injection to end his suffering it hadn’t felt like mercy at the time. Hell, it still didn’t but at least there was the comfort of the loved ones he had left.

Mom died because of a broken heart. Which is why she didn’t run when she still had the chance. The first flood took her and she never turned. Not enough remained of her for her to turn.

What remainder of a family he’d had ended as red on his hands. He had killed, all survivors had. But he was the most savage of all. 

He was, even if Jim wouldn’t hear it whenever he said it out loud.

It didn’t matter. They both knew the truth.

Jim was a murderer too, but that was in the dog-eat-dog world. And Jim hadn’t known these people.

Jim killed his first man when he was nineteen years old because the gun pointed at his head didn’t leave much for choice. Jim didn’t want to die, no matter how hard things got.

Leonard wasn’t so sure sometimes. Jim didn’t like to hear about that either.

Jim walks on into the unknown, water rippling in all directions in cause and effect, annulling themselves each time they collide. “Stop walking so damn fast,” Leonard says, and picks up his pace to stand in front of Jim. He needs to think of other things, he needs a distraction.

They walk past debris and ruins of old buildings Leonard remembers well. The old flower shop and the bookstore. He knows the streets they walk through, but they resemble so little from the past. This is nothing like the ghost towns you have on the prairie, nothing like this little gold mining towns that people left and never visited again. New life was growing in and around the concrete roads. Everywhere around, the water, the grass and the ivy that had broken through stone to make their way, that was life. Nature had accommodated to the changes and lived.

That was the irony of it all. There was still space for life on earth. Just not theirs.

“Sam and I used to get coffee over there,” Jim says pointing at the remainder of a little corner store. “They did a great latte, not too expensive either. I used to know the owner.” Leonard can hear his thoughts trail off. 

“Do you know what happened to them?” Leonard asks.

“Nah,” Jim replies and keeps walking. They make their way through the inner city, climbing over and between one of the knocked down skyscrapers. There are a couple of bodies there, non-military.

They move on.

“They had twins, two boys,” Jim says. By then they’re somewhere in an alleyway, secluded with a good overview around them. There’s not supposed to be anyone here in the outer city, but neither should they. Most likely there are still armed scouts in the area, mercenary’s if they’re unlucky.

Jim doesn’t fear them. He’s come to be unafraid of the ones alive, and more or less calm for the ones that are not. He has the methodical calmness of someone who might have been in the military himself. He could’ve been, though Leonard had never asked, and was pretty sure that he didn’t want to know the answer to that one. In some cases, ignorance was bliss after all.

Leonard says nothing while Jim talks. A trait he’s learned the hard way when it comes to the kid. Because in most cases, Leonard is an open book. His heart, his soul, if there is such a thing, he can’t hide it, not even when he wants to. But Jim has layer after layer of secrets that Leonard almost has no way of uncovering. Not by force anyway, and sometimes he’s afraid that not even time will be able to remedy that reticence. For now, he knows that whatever Jim wishes to share he shares it in passing, and they are things easy to miss if you don’t pay attention.

“I remember, one of them got sick. They think it was the water. And the couple who owned the place, the woman, she took both of the kids to Iowa, her parents lived there like ours had. She thought the fresh air would be good for them,” Jim absent-mindedly licks his lips, and he combs fingers through his hair pushing a long fringe back that immediately falls back into place. “My grandpa lived a couple of miles away from Des Moines. I gave them the address, said I was going to be there in about a month or so myself. Going back home.”

“You know, March, five years ago I just drove into San Francisco for a surprise visit to my brother. I didn’t mean to stay,” Jim says. “I never meant to stay here.”

Leonard knows there’s nothing to say to that. He watches how Jim turn towards the open sky, half expecting him to start crying. But Jim only ever cries in the night when he sleeps and he thinks no one’s looking.

Perhaps that’s for the best as well.

Sometimes, he wishes he was able to do the same.

>>>IV<<<

Winter comes cold and calming. They’ve all prepared for the snow and the hail. Even paired up more people together in huts to make up for the lack of heating inside. The children sleep on the top floor of the infirmary. Together with Chekov who’s become a big brother for all of them without him realizing it. Leonard sleeps there too, to make space for the women who have taken the hut. He doesn’t mind, the infirmary is the warmest place in the village most of the time, but he feels like the children have more need of a female figure than an old man who feels even older. Even though Chapel believes this to be some backwards thinking nonsense that comes from him being born in the deep South.

He doesn’t know if it does or it doesn’t. He only knows that if he were alone in the world, cold and with no place to go. He’d long for his mama, not some old doctor whose heart’s too broken to give anything back.

The kids care for each other for the most part. There’s always some who crouch closer, who kiss each other when they confess in shame that they do miss their mom and dad. As if it were something shameful for a six year old to say. Those times Leonard feels most at a loss. He can’t bring back people from the dead, much as he had tried to. Nor did he feel the capability to mend anything but a flesh wound. When your own heart isn’t whole there isn’t much to give away to others.

The snow brings joy in the kid’s hearts again. It starts to snow, which is detrimental for the communications center, and a bit much for most of the other facilities in the settlement. But the children are able to run and play, hit each other with snowballs and rumble and tumble through the snow until they’re nothing but laughter and runny noses. Those nights they always slept like babies, no tears.

By the third day of snow the hill of the infirmary has become a slippery slope of slush and ice, and the children beg Leonard to be able to get some rusty roof paneling from the supply shed so they could make their own, unsafe, sleighs. He almost didn’t regret the decision when he noticed the happiness of the children. But couldn’t help but yell at them once or twice when they were being especially dangerous.

“I thought I said a maximum of four on each sled, dammit,” he yells at them, wrapped in every scarf and sweater he owns so he can stand outside without freezing to death. They do as they’re told, which is good. Some kids, tired and wet move back inside to warm up, which is better. Inside, Chapel waits for them, with dry clothes and a wonderful amount of patience to listen to their incoherent and wild tales.

Before the sun begins to set, she calls them all inside to get changed before dinner. And while they do that, the older ones helping the youngest, she goes outside to join Leonard. Who watches the scenery, which isn’t at all a pristine winter wonderland but a muddy slushy battlefield. The kids’ doing and a more beautiful sight.

Without saying a word, she twists her arm around Leonard’s and stands next to him.

“Hendorff found Chekov’s father today,” she says, her eyes still on the snow white tips of the pine trees in the distance. “I didn’t tell you because he didn’t make it,” she explains before Leonard has a chance to ask. “He had this mark by his throat. It hadn’t gotten to his mind yet but--,” she pauses, and not without reason. Chekov always insisted that his dad was just a couple of miles away from finding this place. How his father had been in the Russian military, that the elements wouldn’t slow him down one bit. That, if someone ought to have made it, it would’ve been his father.

“Hendorff took him out?” Leonard finishes for Chapel so she doesn’t have to.

The tears that spring in her eyes are more than proof enough, but she takes another breath, and her voice almost doesn’t tremble at all. “Sulu insisted he was going to be the one to tell him. He wanted to do it today, but the kids were having too much fun. I thought, he’s been waiting so long. He might as well tell him tomorrow,” she says. “I know you don’t agree,” she quickly adds.

“I don’t,” Leonard admits, but he doesn’t press it further. Chapel’s had this great drive to make the best of things, to shield others from the pain of loss. He didn’t always agree with her methods and her ideas of how other were supposed to cope with loss. Then again, she wasn’t the one still having nightmares in the night. So he lets the topic rest, he wants to. Chapel’s right, it has been a good day, and he doesn’t want to ruin it by fighting. The children always notice when they fight. They aren’t intimate, Chapel and he, but just as much as Chekov is a surrogate brother to all, they’ve somewhat become the children’s surrogate parents.

And children can always tell when their parents fight.

“Spock’s been trying to set up a lab in one of the empty storing units,” he says. “He’s asked me to help him.” To help him find a cure had been Spock’s direct words, but they sound so preposterous, even in his mind that he doesn’t dare speak it.

“That’s wonderful,” Chapel replies, and by the lackluster voice, that’s not insincere but no less straining for momentum, she has the same doubts. It’s hard not to doubt these days anyway.

“Do you think--” she begins, and doesn’t end it.

“I don’t know,” Leonard replies. He’d like to add that he doesn’t think so, but he doesn’t permit himself such intolerable cruelty.

>>>V<<<

Jim’s standing by the shallow end of the water, ankle deep, sun burning on his back and eyes squinting, a hand above his eyes to block out the sun. “That’s your line, Bones!” he says, waving at Leonard on top of the hill.

“Is it?” Leonard asks, though he’s got the book in his hand.

“Yeah,” Jim replies, his hands gesturing  in wild movements. “Oh, the brave Caesar!” he bellows in a low pitched voice, and then looks at him expectantly.

“What, I have to repeat it?” Leonard asks, flipping to the next page, the last page of the fifth scene.

“Duh,” Jim replies.

“Oh, the brave Caesar,” Leonard tells Jim and Jim groans and sits down in the water. “It’s not fun unless you do it for real, Bones.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leonard mutters, and he stands up and rolls his trousers up before clumsily walking down the hill. “Oh, the brave Caesar,” he yells, his voice shaking from the big steps he takes coming down.

Jim lets out a loud laugh, then he scrunches his face into a disapproving grimace and shakes his fist at Leonard. “Be choked with such another emphasis! Say, “the brave Antony.”

“The valiant Caesar!” Leonard yells again, and he almost stumbles into the water on his knees but Jim catches him by the shoulders just in time. He laughs and regains his balance.

“I will give thee my teeth. If thou with Caesar paragon again, My man of men.”

“Bloody teeth, Jim,” Leonard says, reading off the page. “I will give thee bloody teeth.”

“What’s in a name?” Jim says with dramatic flair, falling down on his knees in the clear water.

Leonard chortles. “Wrong play,” he says and then he clears his throat and says. “By your most gracious pardon, I sing but after you.” He gestures at Jim, who stands up smiling and approaches him, tries to take a grab for the book in Leonard’s hand.

Leonard dances out of his range and shakes his head. “I don’t think so, Jimmy.”

“Hey, stop that.” Jim wrestles his way back into Leonard’s range trying to take the novel back. “I don’t know the next line.”

“You told me you knew the whole thing by heart, Jim,” Leonard said, smiling and a little breathless as he darts into deeper water. “By your most gracious pardon.” He repeats again and Jim rolls his eyes. He waddles behind Leonard who resists only a little as Jim walks in closer, grabs hold of his upper arms and gazes on him with an unreadable expression on his face as Leonard smiles at him.

“Go on,” Jim nods at the book. He waits until Leonard repeats the line word for word, reading the lines again.

“You remember now?” Leonard asks him, reeling his smile in and receiving a swift kiss on the lips in return. He lets Jim take the book in his one hand and tangles his fingers around Jim’s thin digits when he offers the other. Jim stands just close enough to the riverbank to throw the novel on dry land, pages flipping in the air as it lands in the mud, inches from the water.

Jim turns around, his hands still in Leonard’s as he moves him in closer. “Those were my salad days,” he says. “When I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then,” he says, remembering the words just as he said them.

Leonard pulls a face at him. “That’s what she says?” he asks Jim incredulously.

Jim doesn’t reply, he lets go of Leonard and waddles all the way into the water until he’s in waist deep, then twists himself on his back and floats. “I used to love that part,” he says. “Young and innocent.” His voice drifts off again. Leonard wonders just what he’s remembering now. 

Jim was an English major in college while Leonard never found Shakespeare or any other old English novelist for that matter all that interesting. And Leonard wonders why Jim reads at all when it so often makes him drift into this melancholic state. He becomes alien to his usual self, the tireless kid who used to ride motorcycles and sleep around and come home with bloody noses, loose teeth and a lifetime worth of stories.

That Jim who has no place in the time they’re in now, which is why Leonard had felt so drawn to him in the first place.

The beacon of hope, some semblance of light in that dark world they were living in.

When Jim read this Jim disappeared and a far darker version, darker than Leonard himself appeared.

Perhaps, he thought, and it was a thought he had rather kept for himself, for it was a dark thought and it depressed him.

Perhaps he thought that he himself had been the optimistic one all along, and that not so deep inside of Jim was something akin to despair. Waiting to come out.

Leonard wished, sometimes, that Jim never found the lost little books while they traveled. Left behind by people who didn’t make it.

Reading was one of the few pastimes Jim and his brother had in common. And Jim himself confessed that going to his brother’s home was most like going to a public library without check-in cards.

“Jim,” Leonard says, and he takes heavy steps, low ones that don't reach over the surface of the water but long strides that kicks up mud and turns the fresh water of the river into a cloudy storm. Jim sighs, but he stops floating, he sits up, crouched down so that everything below his arm is engulfed by the cool water.

Leonard does the same, swims towards him though the water is shallow enough to stand in. He tries to look at Jim, but Jim’s eyes are unfocused, his mind somewhere else again. Leonard moves in close enough to hug him, wraps his arms around him and leans his head on Jim’s shoulder. Jim sighs and mimics the gesture. They stay like this for a little while, one breath, two breaths, and Jim clenches his fist in the back of Leonard’s drenched t-shirt, and Leonard can feel Jim’s breaths growing deeper and slower, can tell that he’s closing his eyes.

There’s the sound of gunshots in the distance, around the way they came, and they break apart, the noise more sobering than surprising. “That sounded pretty close,” Leonard says, looking at the direction of the shots, even though the high hills that lead to the river bank keep him from looking into the distance.

“Let’s pack our things,” Jim says, and he walks back to shore, pulling his clothes on while he’s still wet and then jamming the rest of their things into his pack. Five minutes later they’re ready to get on the road again and they follow the trail in the opposite direction, due north, when Leonard realizes that the book is still at the bottom of the embankment. He turns to grab it but Jim grabs his wrist before he can get to it. “Leave it,” he says, before dropping Leonard’s wrist again and walking ahead.

“It’s one of your favorites,” Leonard says, but he doesn’t try to take it anymore, he walks beside Jim, who keeps his eyes set to the north.

“Stuff like that’ll only slow us down,” Jim says. “I know it by heart.”

Leonard doesn’t argue further. In a few days the rain will come, and when the tides rise the old novel will be taken just as everything else in the riverbank. 

Three days later Jim finds Chaucer, in an old family home. Jim takes it with him when he thinks Leonard isn’t looking. 

>>>VI<<<

Winter ends. Another season comes and goes.

The air thickens, and in the heat and light the first mosquitoes appear, the bane of spring.

Uhura says some smoke might help, for one day perhaps, not for other months of the season and the one following it. Though it’s as good an idea as any, and Scotty builds a large wooden heap without being asked and they light it on a clear night.

Everyone gathers there, to eat together, to talk together, and later when the fire burns, a warm heat that’s just as smothering as it is comfy.

They’re all just thankful that they’re not alone.

They play music on makeshift instruments while Uhura sings, and others join in, more out of tune but no less extracting from the merriment of it all. And Leonard watches how they dance around the campfire like savages, so unlike the people he remembered back home, in the city or outside. How far they’ve gone from standing in corners and pressed against walls with drinks clutched in their hands.  Bobbing their heads to the beat of a one-day-fly pop hit from a beautiful mediocre singer whose name they wouldn’t remember in a year or two.

It strikes him how little so many things matter nowadays, not the shoes, not the clothes, not the money.

Still, they have all lost too much to speak of it as a good thing. Instead, he finds it more of a foreign thing, or more likely a forgotten thing. People must’ve been like this all along at some level. Longed for it at least, some uncomplicated happiness at last.

He twirls the ring on his finger. It’s been slipping off, he’s been eating less. He’s not coming back, and if Leonard wastes away at the thought of it he's not doing it on purpose. When the time comes, he still wants to live, he knows he does.

Uhura stops dancing, and laughs as she stops in the sandbanks, plants her foot in a ditch she kicks in herself and sits down as ungraciously as Leonard has ever seen her. He offers her a fond smile, because he is fond of her, and gains a kiss on the cheek in return.

“You don’t dance?” she concludes, more than asks.

“I don’t dance,” Leonard replies, his fingers still restless. He sees Uhura glancing at the ring, and turns his hands down, sits still, but the harm has been done, and Uhura’s laughs disappears.

“You never talk about him,” she says, her voice low, but it isn’t needed, the world around them is still dancing, still laughing.

Leonard looks down, and shifts his feet from under him and takes the ring off, he twists it in his finger slowly, examining something precious.  “I don’t,” he replies in a quiet voice, and blinks a couple of times.

Uhura’s hands are warm on his knees, she pulls herself closer to him, sits right in front of him, shielding the dancing people and the heat of the fire. “Tell me about him,” she asks. Leonard looks away, sees Spock watching. He imagines Spock can tell every word about to be spoken. He pulls the ring tight on his middle finger.

“He’s, ehm, he’s smart,” he says, trying to sound neutral. “Very smart. He told me how to find this place, long time ago. He didn’t know. But he had an idea and it got me here.”

Uhura looked surprised. “He knew about the radio transmitter?”

Leonard shook his head. “Found it by chance because he used to do Ham radio in college. But one he picked it up, he tried to keep us on the right track.”

Uhura moves to Leonard’s side and makes herself more comfortable. “He led you here.”

“He’s the reason I’m still alive,” he admits. “We got separated while we were on the run.”

He remembers that part. Running through thick bushes with such velocity that the sharp ends of the trees ripped their dry skin. Jim, always trying to play the bloody hero running the opposite direction, into the enemy fire. And Leonard, always getting saved, just running uphill like they planned. Waiting for the flashlights to dim and the shouting to stop. He thought Jim would be there at the top of the hill waiting. A smug smile on his face and perhaps a scratch or two, with something witty to say. “Finally, old man. Don’t lose your lunch.”

There was no one on top of that hill.

Uhura gets pulled away by three young girls begging her to sing another song. Leonard tries to give her a reassuring smile.

>>>VII<<<

Jim stares at him, eyes open wide, his face speckled in red drops like freckles. They dry to his skin as he tries to stand up, chest heaving up and down, fingers bracing the wall like his knees might give in any second.

He’s looking at Leonard, panicked, Leonard has never seen Jim this frightened. He watches how Jim’s hands start shaking as he kind of reaches for him.

He’s too far to do anything about the gun aimed at Leonard’s head.

Leonard’s hands are clammy and his finger on the trigger feels heavy, he doesn’t pull it yet. For some reason his hands can’t stop shaking either, and he can’t aim worth a damn.

“Bones,” Jim says, but it’s a hollow hum in Leonard’s mind. He tries to breathe but it feels like he’s drowning. So he breathes deeper, and quicker, till all he can hear is the wheezing in and exhale.

He’s looking at the ground just in front of Jim’s feet, the remainder of a thing half Leonard’s size on the ground and splattered across the wall and on Jim’s face.

She wasn’t wearing any shoes, but she would’ve never felt how the ground was grinding the skin of her soles away. Nor would she have noticed how the little sundress she wore was tearing apart.

Leonard lets out a sound, a wail he supposes, that seems foreign. His knees hit the ground before he even notices he’s falling. He drops the gun by accident, his fingers to loose around the handle, and it lies in blood that trickles towards him, the pavement uneven enough to do so.

Another one of those foreign sounds and he buries his face in his hands.

He closes his eyes but the image remains. A head blown to bits, just a shell from something that was a little girl once. He sobs, biting his lower lip to push them back, but like waves they only come back stronger.

It’s only logical, he’s never been able to hide his despair.

It’s not fair anyway, how he’s supposed to do this twice.

Jim comes to him, kneels in front of him, shielding the view. He puts his hands on Leonard’s shoulders and cranes his neck, trying to make Leonard look at him. “Bones,” he repeats, louder. “Bones, look at me.”

Leonard closes his eyes and shakes his head. He only bows deeper, makes himself smaller. He wants to disappear. The thoughts messing up his brain like static. 

He grimaces, disgusted with himself, even more so because he can’t stop the tears, can’t quiet down. He’s never cried so loud, and it’s the stupidest thing because anyone and anything can hear. If he doesn’t die now, he dies soon enough. Jim is still holding him by the shoulders and grips him almost so tight that it hurts.

Jim is still speaking to him, sweet nothings. They both know the truth. He killed his father and his little girl, a bullet to the brain like a butcher. It didn’t even hurt, he made sure it wouldn’t.

He calms down just enough to orientate himself, and it’s not by chance that the first thing he sees is Jim’s gun. He takes it without hesitation, the cold barrel against his temple comforting.

Jim’s voice becomes clear, like when a fog clears. “Bones,” he says, his voice shaking. “Listen to me. Don’t....don’t, Bones.” There’s a soft click when Leonard pulls the safety off. He closes his eyes again.

“Bones, come on,” Jim grits the words out like gravel. Leonard hears it, he can almost feel it.

“I’m so tired, Jim,” he says. 

Jim’s fingers unwrap from Leonard’s shoulders and he moves for the other gun, Leonard’s gun. And he cocks the gun much louder.

“Fine,” he says, voice still shaking. “But if you go, I go.” He hears Jim’s voice catch in his throat and opens his eyes when he realizes the kid’s crying. “You hear me, Bones? It’s either the both of us, or nothing at all.” When Leonard sobs, so does Jim, but he adjust himself at the same time, cranes himself closer like he’s trying to get into Leonard’s skin.

“You’re all I’ve got, Bones,” he says through gritted teeth. Furious or desperate. “It’s just us. We’re all we’ve got.”

Leonard drops the gun, and moves to remove the barrell from Jim’s temple as well.

Jim drops it, still furious, he wipes his face with his sleeve. He does the same for Leonard.

Exhausted, Leonard lets Jim pull him to his feet, and they walk, for about an hour, Jim holding on to Leonard’s hand the entire time.

They find shelter in the back room of an old arcade hall.

>>>VIII<<<

Chekov coops himself up in one of the sheds where they keep the building scraps for three days, in what Leonard thinks is mourning. And he doesn’t let Chapel go to him, trying to coax him in getting back. Because sometimes grief needs to be carried alone for a little bit, until it’s time to move on.

And Chapel looks at him with fire in her eyes. “What do you know about moving on, Leonard?” her lip is thin and her eyes unblinking. She leaves the hut with a pack of food and all her clothes. Though Leonard knows she’ll return, she always does.

If he had the capacity, Leonard would’ve believed he loved her.

If Chapel loves him back then that’s why they’re not getting along today, as they do most days. It was the same with Jim, but Jim had the tendency to not walk away from a fight. He was the type to roil it out like spitfire until there was no more heat in the room left, and he’d bask in the silent aftermath and the soft reconciliation with the same passion.

Chapel isn’t Jim, and the relationship they have together, it isn’t like Jim and he used to have. They sleep in the same bed, on the same sheet covered floor, skin to skin and bone to bone. Chapel’s breasts resting on his chest sometimes, as she traces her fingers through his hair, searching for stray greys. But they don’t kiss, not in that way, even though she crawls into him in the nights in much the same way his ex-wife used to do.

He hasn’t the energy to recognize the psychological mess of it all.

Chapel wants to mother Chekov and perhaps the boy does need a mother. He knew he needed his mother when he was seventeen. And Chapel gives it with energy to spare, effort to spare, because she never had a chance to be a true mother. In name perhaps yes, but the child she carried had never taken a single breath on earth.

He takes the pack Chapel left behind by accident and leaves. The weather is good, early spring. Chapel is already half-way down the hill, carrying too much to keep her balance. Leonard is there in time to steady her by the shoulder. She doesn’t pull away, and when Leonard gives a rueful smile, he can tell that Chapel is having a hard time keeping her frown in place.

“Here,” she says, heaving part of her belongings on Leonard’s shoulder. “You can carry them back uphill too. If it comes to that.”

“I hope so,” Leonard replies, grunting as he exaggeratedly buckles his knees at the weight of the bag.

Chapel almost does push him off balance with a shove. And she doesn’t wait for Leonard to follow as she walks further downhill until they reach the intersecting footpath that winds down, and Leonard has to walk fast to catch up to her.

Despite the obvious intent to her packing, she still smiles at every passerby, her face returning to discontent as soon as they lose eye-contact.

“I’m sorry, Christine,” Leonard says.

Chapel looks at Leonard briefly and then brings her eyes back on the road. “You always are. Stop apologizing.”

“It’s all I can do.”

Chapel scoffs. “Bullshit.”

Leonard lets out a sigh. “Fine,” he says. “Then I’m not sorry.”

“Exactly, own up to you being an ass. That’s what I call progress.”

They make a turn towards the outskirts of the village, the complete opposite direction to where Leonard thought they were going. To the little stream they use for getting fresh water. That’s where Chapel drops her packs on the driest path she can find. Leonard mimics her.

She kicks off her shoes and takes one of her own broken plastic bottles to pour some water up from the stream, and instead of doing something, she just sits down on the ground and looks at it.

Meanwhile Leonard kicks off his own shoes and then stands there, waiting. He isn’t sure how to apologize to a woman who doesn’t want his kind of apologies. And he thinks about that many times that Jocelyn eluded him with her silent dissatisfaction.

“Do you love me, Leonard?” Chapel asks out of the blue.

Leonard doesn’t know what to say to that.

“I do,” he replies.

It’s the wrong answer, he knows, but it’s not exactly a lie.

It’s not enough so Chapel laughs.

“Right,” she says, pausing, drinking, turning the bottle between her hands. “There’s still place in the woman’s hut. I think it’s best if I move in there today. Uhura’s been asking me, because she and Spock will be staying at the communication hut from now on. It think that’s best.”

“If that’s what you want,” Leonard replies. “But I don’t want you to go. Leaving the children on our behalf. I can get out just as easily.”

“No. I want to go. The kids love you just as much as they love me. It won’t make a difference.”

“It’ll make a difference that we’re not both there,” Leonard replies, surprised by his own hostility. “We all depend on each other in there. That includes me. I depend on you.”

Chapel ruffles her own hair, and drops her bottle on the ground.

“You depend on memories, Leonard,” she says, her head held back, like she’s basking in some imaginary sun. “You dream him and breathe him, and live for him. A memory. And here I am, and I’ve come to want to be that person for you. I really do, but I know you can’t…you’re not going to reciprocate. And that’s all right. I respect that,”  her voice is slow and calm. If something about Chapel reminds Leonard of his ex-wife then it must be this. “Don’t expect me to stick around. Don’t ask that of me,” she says in all finality.

Leonard lowers his pack on the ground, the weight moving from his shoulders. But he’s nailed to the ground, and even though he knows all the right answers as to what to do and what to say to make it right, he finds he cannot say them. Instead he puts his hands in his pockets and shifts his weight on his legs.

“I understand,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He leaves Chapel to herself. There’s nothing left to say. 

Until he stands in front of the path that leads to the outside without remembering how he got there.

In the same somnolent state he looks down and realizes he isn’t wearing any shoes. He rolls his eyes at himself. The morning is cool, and somehow he hadn’t noticed until then, then again he hadn’t noticed a whole lot nowadays.

He curls his toes in the dirt as he feels his heart battering in his chest, and it feels like free-falling, it feels like after a fight well won. It pushes him, and he almost stumbles on the first step, as he moves down the path, accelerating, running.

Maybe he’s having some kind of cardiac arrest, some kind of great rush before his heart gives in forever. That’s what it feels like.

He moves against the wind, and a flock of starlings, flee with startled sounds.

And still Leonard does not stop.

He passes the first landmarks, the second and the third, until he ditches the path and stumbles down hills nearly breaking his neck while the trees and twigs try to subjugate him to the ground.

And at the next turn he sees nothing but sky, the ground stopping suddenly. He doesn’t slow down.

No, not until he almost slides down the precipice, his arms swinging to keep his balance. He lets himself fall, flat on his back, and he hits the ground hard, and it hurts so bad he feels like he loses it for a second.

When he catches his breath he sits up and looks at a place he’s never seen before. He is lost and he laughs.

It takes a while to be happy.

>>>IX<<<

It’s summer now, and the sun comes up too early and too bright.

Jim always grows restless under the sun, like a solar panel on the loose. “Bones, Bones, Bones,” he shakes Leonard awake. Leonard stirs, he’s been already half-awake for the past three hours when Jim left the bed the first time.

“No,” he grumbles, turning around, facing the open window. There, a bright red hue forms behind his eyelids from the sun, and he groans when he realizes there is no way he’s dragging the morning out any further than he’s already had.

He sits up and faces Jim, who’s watching him while being perched on a chair like a monkey, dragging his knees to his chest and bare toes bent around the edge.

“Something came up,” Jim says, not looking Leonard in the eye but eyes drifting downwards to the bare skin of his chest. Unlike Jim, Leonard sleeps naked, especially in summer. It’s the difference between a man with a get-up-and-go attitude and the one who likes to take his five minutes of waking up when he can.

A draft of cool air bleeds in though the broken glass of their window and Leonard shivers. He pulls the thin covers over his body and puts his feet on the floor.

“Something?” he asks, keeping a hand up as Jim jumped off his chair and threw him his clothes.

When they first met, that was about two years ago, they each had things of their own. Little possessions left from another time.

Leonard used to live in one of those old huts in the outskirts of town, just inside the quarantine zone, not the safest place, but it was secluded and didn’t give much for prying eyes. He wasn’t afraid of thieves because he hadn’t had anything worth stealing. 

Jim had stumbled on his apartment well before he’d even met Leonard. Before Pike managed to convince them to take on a little smuggling job together that ended up with Jim almost bleeding out in an alleyway and Leonard, in his desperation, having to cauterize the wound with a burning hot knife blade. He’d told the kid to hold his eyes on him, to try not to scream for fear of being found. Jim had trashed and trembled until, breath shaking, he had grabbed Leonard’s face in both hands and pulled him towards him, kissing him so hard that he drew blood.

When it was done, Jim pulled off and proceeded to throw up, mostly bile. Stumbling to his feet minutes later,  stooping back to that old apartment of his, insisting he was fine.

Leonard worried for Jim, but was also fascinated at the time. Not that he sought the boy out at first, Leonard knew better than that. But he never turned the kid away when he took those unnecessary trips to his hut on the edge of the quarantine zone. How he sat on Leonard’s bed and handed him old medical journals like bartering gifts, and one time even managed to salvage a bottle of bourbon and under an excuse to have no one to share it with, they drank the whole bottle in a single evening.

When Leonard chose to kiss him first, that was a bit of a gamble. But he was drunk, far beyond the thoughts of a sensible man, and most importantly, that single moment of Dutch courage had more or less granted him the one thing Leonard had craved for the past few months.

Without talking about it, they had come to some kind of ‘understanding’, that mutated into something else. 

“Define something,” Leonard elaborates, when Jim insists on holding the words suspended in the air as if he hasn’t said them.

“It’s gonna pay well. I also got a couple of rounds up front.” He grabs Leonard’s gun and waves it in the air. “More if we get the job done.”

Leonard gets dressed and scrutinizes Jim at the same time. “Nero?” he asks, not bothering to stop the accusation in his voice.

“They’re the only ones who still got them in the city, Bones,” Jim replies. It’s a conversation they’ve had so many times. One of the few things they can’t seem to see eye to eye on.

Leonard scoffs. “That’s great, Jim,” he says and walks up to him to take his gun back, his hands more circling Jim’s lean fingers than the handle. “You know for every bullet we receive we get at least a dozen of them shot our way?”

Jim arches his brow and grips the gun a little tighter. When Leonard pulls the gun towards him Jim doesn’t let go. “There’s food too, Bones,” he says. “We need food.” He says it like he has to remind Leonard, but they’ve been eating overdated crackers and rancid leftovers.

Still, Leonard’s too stubborn to admit Jim’s right, let alone agree to risking their lives on some kind of fool’s errand. He lets the gun go and walks away instead. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” he gripes.

He hears Jim click the new cartridge into the gun.

There’s a rat in the bathroom that scurries away when Leonard walks in. They’re a common sight but Leonard still stands on his tiptoes when he approaches the sink, and checks himself in the bathroom mirror.

His hair is getting long, sticking out this way and that. He combs it, though he’s not sure why, then reaches for the jerry can filled with water that they keep under the sink.

It’s almost empty.

He sighs, takes just enough so he can wash his face and brush his teeth. No doubt Jim already knows they’re almost out of water too. He doesn’t believe for a second that Nero sought them out for a job, knowing Jim he’s the one who went searching for that demon. Requesting a job just risky enough to be worth the reward.

When he returns to the kitchen, Jim’s made an attempt at coffee. A kind of reconciliation gift.

“If you don’t want to go I’ll ask Gary,” Jim says, attempting to be reasonable.

“No, you fucking won’t,” Leonard replies. “Mitchell’s one step away from belonging in an asylum. Hell, if they still existed I’d personally pull him into a straitjacket and deliver him there myself.” He takes the mug of coffee and leans against the countertop. “He’ll get both your asses killed.”

Jim’s eye roll is more meant to be provoking than mordant. “So, what? You’re a psychiatrist now?” he asks.

“Psychologist, Jim,” Leonard replies drily. “But I don’t need a degree to recognize a maniac in the making.”

Jim throws his hands up in surrender. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Bones. So what do you want to do? Starve?”

“Infant.” Leonard walks back into the bedroom, stuffs his bag and holsters his gun. “I never said I wasn’t coming with you,” he yells to Jim in the other room.

When he returns, Jim is sitting on the counter-top. Sipping from the mug of black coffee in silence and glancing at Leonard who has half a mind of flipping the bastard off.

“You know I love it when you act all pedantic, Bones. Sexy beast.”

Leonard lets out a scathing laugh and gives Jim the finger.

There’s a tell-tale smirk on Jim’s face that the coffee cup won’t hide.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Drowing in work, but I'm trying to edit the already written stories and just uploading them as I go along.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


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